


there & back again

by groaninlynch



Category: The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: M/M, second person narrative (you)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-18 00:19:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2328407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groaninlynch/pseuds/groaninlynch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You stare out into the darkness and the darkness stares back. You know he is the only thing tethering you down. But maybe it's time to let go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there & back again

**Author's Note:**

> pretty much your average snedge fix-it fic, where they're lost and then found and blahblah. but it wouldn't get out of my head, so. here it is, in all its cliché glory.
> 
> this is for my little sister, #1 snedge fan.

The air is thick with humidity, heavy with the promise of a rainstorm, when you step out onto the porch. You used to love storms, finding comfort in the patter of rain again your window, soothed  by the gentle rumbling of distant thunder, awed by flashes of lightning illuminating the night. It used to lull you to sleep in the warmth of your bed, safe beneath a solid roof secure over four stable walls.

Now, it reminded you of dense jungle forests hiding enemies, sucking mud ripping the boots off your feet. . . Rainstorms are not, you’ve found, so soothing when you are forced to sleep in a wet hole in the ground while being barraged by the deluge — not even really sleeping, too afraid of being snuck up on and killed as the rain masks the sound of footsteps.

Indeed, you have discovered that your perspective on many things you took for granted before — _Before_ — has shifted dramatically in only two years, and not very much so for the better.

But a smooth voice is saying, “Earth to Sledgehammer,” dragging you up from the dirt of Japan and back onto a wooden porch in Mobile, Alabama. Your porch, your house — your home, though you have also found that word has lost its meaning.

You tear your gaze away from the endless darkness of the lawn outside the reach of the porchlights and look over to see him leaning against the railing, cigarette hanging from his smirking mouth. He looks all the world like he is right where he should be, as though he was meant to be here on your Alabaman porch rather than two states away in a bustling city.

Seeing him reminds you why you came outside in the first place. You walk over and join him against the railing, back to the infinite darkness and all the nightmares it harbors. You hate how morbid you’ve become, how sensitive you are now to the simplest thing like nighttime, but the dark is the unknown and you have no way to combat that. Especially now that you’re civilian.

“Reminiscin’ on the good ol’ days?” he’s saying, again bringing you back from just that. His eyebrow quirks upward, a show of the care-free attitude you know is a front, one he has perfected, but you know him. That infinitesimal movement and the attempt at nonchalance when asking that question only serve to confirm your suspicions on why he’s outside — the same reason he’s got his back to the profound maw that is the night, just like you.

You say, “You weren’t in your room,” which is what led you out the front door, and you’re so focused on the accusation you intentionally lace into that sentence that you forget to wince at _your room_.

 His smirk widens into a self-deprecating grin. “Yeah, well.” He shrugs, turns away from you to blow smoke, looks back at you with an accusation of his own: “You were lookin’ in my room.”

You huff a laugh, unsurprised and guiltless, as you lift yourself up to sit on the railing. You glance to the side, into the darkness, despite yourself. The storm is pressing hard against the trees, making the leaves rustle cacophonously. You think of Japanese snipers tucked away in bushes, waiting to pick off your friends one by one —

Bill. . . Burgie. . . Ack-Ack.

You shake your head, look away, close your eyes and take in a calming breath; the taste of rain, the smell of cigarette. When you open your eyes, in your peripheral you can see him looking at you. Out of habit, you suppose, one he’ll never be rid of. It’s second nature for him to be aware of you, ready to protect. You know because you feel the same way about him — about all of them.

Looking down, you meet his gaze, and he does nothing for a moment but stare at you with dark eyes. Then he says, “Once, when I was real little, there was this huge thunderstorm that I swear ‘bout flooded half of Louisiana.” He looks away from you to stare blankly at the front door, mind a hundred miles off and decades back. “Whole streets were swallowed up by water. An’ I thought it’d be a real smart idea to try swimmin’ my way up the road, just for the helluv it.” He exhales smoke and smiles at the memory. “I about drowned my scrawny ass.”

He lets out another cloud of smoke, stark white under the porchlights, and you silently take in the reminiscent smile on his face before glancing away. You consider saying you’ve never experienced an Alabaman storm so bad that everything flooded, never seen anything worse than a few fallen branches off a tree.

Instead you say, “You’re still scrawny,” because you know it’ll turn his soft smile into a bemused grin — and it does.

“I ain’t scrawny, I’ve just got _lean_ muscle,” he says, drawing out the vowels in _lean_ , like that’ll make the claim more true.

“You’ve got _no_ muscle,” you retort, even though this is a blatant lie; you know he’s strong enough to lift a heavy metal mortar, strong enough to hump up some fuckin’ hill in full fatigues, laden with guns and knives and grenades and whatever else the Corps saw fit to saddle its men with. He’s not weak — physically, mentally. Never has been. And, you hope, never will be.

He retaliates by blowing smoke in your face through a taunting smile. “Oh, _you_ —!“ you say, grinning back, sliding off the railing and pushing into him, trying to manhandle the cigarette away from him. Eventually you get it because you’re taller and heavier (and you land an accidental elbow to his face), and you take a deep drag before dropping it to the wooden porch floor and grinding it under your heel. You get a quick painful reminder that you’re barefoot, outside in nothing but a threadbare t-shirt and loose-hanging pajama bottoms.

You look up expecting to be met with his signature glare, and are surprised to find his face blank, his eyebrows raised in vague confusion. “Ain’t your mama gonna be mad about your dirtyin’ up her pretty porch?” he asks, and it catches you off-guard to hear him say a sentence like that with a totally straight face. It makes you drop your grin, and you glance down at the floor. There’s a black mark marring the white wooden surface.

“If my mama wanted to maintain her pretty house, she shouldn’t have let me back in those doors,” is out of your mouth before you can curb the naked truth into something you both can laugh off.

After a long moment of silence, you look back up to see him regarding you the same way he did when you found out Deacon had died. You realize that you sort of feel the same way now that you did then, too, like you lost someone important and irreplaceable. Plenty of your friends and companymen have died before your eyes to justify this feeling, but it’s not them that’s missing, really.

And of course you know who it is — some pale-skinned, red-headed boy with noble notions and a murmuring heart who’s now buried twenty feet deep in the mud on Peleliu and Pavuvu and Okinawa. He’s gone forever. You feel it everyday in the soreness of your throat from screaming through nightmares and the anguished glances from your parents, looking for someone who no longer exists. You are not their boy.

You are just the war-torn, dirt-stained soldier that tromped through their threshold that happens to reflect that child’s look.

You clap your hand to your mouth as you feel your face twist up and your throat get thick. You screw your eyes closed and turn your whole body away, ashamed. But he’s gently saying, “Gene,” just the same way he did when you got that letter. You shake your head, desperately trying to keep it in. When he puts a hand on your shoulder and pulls at you, attempting to turn you back around, you resist, shaking your head harder, and the rest of you follows suit, and soon you are a quivering, sobbing mess.

You’ve had the soul ripped out of you, just like your father warned. Now you’re a man riddled with bullets and enough dark memories to fill up each hole. Oh, God. Fuck.

You can’t fucking— can’t fucking _believe_ that you’re always doing this. You used to be able to swallow this shit down. You used to be— _stronger_ than this.

But you’re not that boy anymore. _Fuck_. _Fuckfuckfuckfuck_ —

You don’t even realize you’re swearing aloud in a steady stream until he hushes you. This is when you also realize that he has come around and pulled you into an embrace, one you are tightly holding on to, your fingers gripping at his shirt — _my shirt_ , you note vaguely, _and it’s way too big for his ‘lean muscle’_. Your face is pressed into his bony shoulder, soaking a mighty fine stain in his — your — shirt. He’s sort of patting, sort of rubbing your back, and he’s just shushing you in a strained voice. You’d be more embarrassed if not for the fact that he’s also got a death grip on you, like the only thing that’s keeping him from breaking down is trying to hold you together.

This whole entire scenario is so goddamn audacious and unbelievable, that he of all people would be attempting to comfort you — and worse, it’s actually working! It’s hilariously bizarre, and you can’t help it when your choking sobs taper into quiet bubbles of laughter that evolve into something more horrifying. You right yourself, though you both are still gripping each other, and you’re coughing up this twisted rendition of a laugh while tears keep trickling down your face. He looks terrified and confused, which makes you laugh even more, more than you have in months, _years_.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry!” you gasp out. In the back of your mind, you know you should be quieter, because it’s the middle of the night and your parents are asleep, but you simply can’t find it in yourself to care.

“Uh,” he says, an uneasy smile cautiously forming on his mouth, “that’s alright, Sledgehammer, you just go on and get it outta you.”

You laugh until your stomach hurts, your face wet with tears that you don’t know come from this attack of unabashed joy or the deep ache you still have. Slowly, your hold on him loosens, and his does the same, until your elbows are on the railing as you lean back against it, guffaws fading into tiny snickers that, too, eventually stop, leaving you with a wide grin plastered on your face. You let out a long, relieved sigh, wipe the tears off your cheeks.

“You’re really out of your depth with the whole comforting thing,” you say to him once you’ve collected yourself. He’s lit up another cigarette, tapping the ashes over the railing to fall into the grass. Off in the distance, thunder rolls loudly.

He shrugs, smirking benignly. “Gotta do what I can.” He’s looking around the porch, glancing every which way, anywhere but at you.

“Thanks,” you tell him.

He meets your gaze at that, cigarette hanging off his lip. Then he reaches up and brushes his thumb under your eye, catching a stray tear. You freeze, shocked at the kindness of the touch, and he doesn’t jerk his hand back, instead letting it hover mid-air for a second, like he’s also surprised he did that, before dropping it down to the railing again. He takes the cig out of his mouth, keeping his eyes focused on you, and he asks, “You remember when I told you not to cut out that Jap’s teeth cuzza germs?”

You nod, knitting your eyebrows, trying to see where he’s going with this.

“It wasn’t actually cuzza germs,” he says plainly, and you snort and roll your eyes, because what a thing to say. But when you look at him again, he isn’t smiling. He’s staring at you a little imploringly, like he wants you to understand what he’s saying without actually having to say it.

“I know,” you tell him soberly.

He’s still looking at you, a bit incredulous, as though he doesn’t believe that you _actually_ know, as if you _couldn’t_ actually know. He quirks an eyebrow and turns his face away, snubs his cigarette out in the ashtray you hadn’t realized he’d brought outside with him,. You see it’s got several crushed-up butts, burned down to a stub.

“Hey,” you say, and when he looks over, you lightly push into his shoulder, leaning your weight on a hand steadying you on the rail, and gently, gently, gently press your mouth to his, and you suddenly think of Annalise Greene in the sixth grade. She had taken you out behind the schoolhouse and told you to kiss her, and she tasted like apples and cinnamon and had the softest lips in the world.

He is absolutely not Annalise Greene. He tastes like what you imagine licking an ashtray would taste like, and his lips are chapped, torn up from his chewing off the dead skin. Annalise had been eager and pliant, folding in close to you. He is stiff enough to make a tree seem flexible.

You let him go, but you don’t back away, watching his eyes open. His mouth is hanging open like he wants to say something. No words come out. You smile and lean your forehead against his. He lets out a shaky breath that feathers across your cheek.

Finally, he finds his voice, though it is soft and private, just for you: “What do you think you’re doin’, Eugene Sledge?”

A million answers to that question pass through your mind, the most honest of which would be _I have no goddamn clue._ But instead of that, you say, “I could ask you the same thing, Merriell Shelton,” because you know it’ll make him laugh — and it does. You feel it as much as you hear it, vibrating against you.

When you move to kiss him again, he mirrors you, and you meet in another slow, unhurried kiss, and this time you think about when you found him in Louisiana after the war. He’d left you alone on the train, and you understood why, and you were not angry. He never was the sentimental type, you knew, and preferred to be alone, to be _left_ alone.

You respected that — for a time. Then you looked him up, and hopped on a train, and went right up to his door, and knocked once-twice-thrice, and the door swung open and there he was. You remember the exact moment when you realized all his rantings about being better off by himself and him liking it that way was total bullshit: when he opened that door and saw you standing there and could not mask the relief in his voice when he said, “Eugene.”

So you shook your head and you told him, “You’re so full of shit,” and within the week got him on a train back to Mobile. After all, it wasn’t exactly a hard thing for him to leave behind a roach-infested studio apartment that he was paying for with the last of his paycheck from the Corps, seeing as he hadn’t been able to hold down a job. It took you that week to burn through every lame excuse he had not to leave — but here he’d come, and here he’d stayed for the last few months. You’d started sleeping easier — if not perfectly — with a friend who knew what you’d been through staying in a room down the hall, so your parents let the days lapse into weeks lapse into months because they didn’t have the heart to throw him out (though you know your mother secretly thrives on fussing over him).

You think of all this because you wonder if maybe, now, you will be able to live without the background promise that he’ll leave again while you’re asleep, making you wake up to his absence and accept that it’s what he really wants. Maybe now you won’t have to walk outside to see if he’s still here, in Alabama, in your house. Maybe his room can really be his room.

So of course, when you part again, and he absently brushes your bangs out of your face, drags his hand down your cheek, then settles back against the rail, he says, “I can’t stay here, Sledgehammer.”

And you sigh because the hopeful boy with the murmuring heart had tried to resurrect, but you know he’s better off stuck in the mud, protected forever from the harsh realities of the world.

But you’re not surprised, so you say, “I know,” since you do, even if you don’t want to. You lean against the rail next to him, both your backs to the darkness once again, shoulders touching, arms pressed together.

He takes in a deep breath, lets it all out at once. Then, staring at the doors of the house, he says, “Come with me, Gene,” as calmly as if he were talking about the weather.

“To Louisiana?” you ask dumbly.

“Yeah,” he says, and he looks at you, and there’s no earnestness or begging or doubt on his face, just matter-of-fact ease, “or wherever, I donno. Doesn’t have to be Louisiana. Just come with me.”

“Well,” you start, and then you think about your mother and her expectant looks, your father and his pitying ones. You think about your brother, who can’t seem to fathom why you will never don a uniform again. You think about this huge house that is no longer “home” to you, how its walls offer no comfort, its roof no protection.

You think about jumping on a train bound across a hundred-fifty miles toward a person you had no clue whether wanted you to come around or not, and how despite that, he was so relieved to see you.

You think about how relieved you were when he came back with you. How the room down the hall from yours started to feel like home to you, somewhere you could stumble into in the middle of the night and know you’ll be well-received with a, “Nips nippin’ ya, Sledgehammer?” How you started to realize that maybe home wasn’t a building with four walls and a roof, after all.

You think about all this and then you think about how chapped lips and cigarette smoke-perfume are a million times better than all the sweet soft mouths of apple-eaters everywhere.

You haven't really got anything to lose anymore.

So you say, just as simply and matter-of-fact as him, “Alright.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> please spare me any "the hobbit" jokes :^)


End file.
